On April 29, SCO will finally have its day in court, but not exactly in the way the Unix and Linux litigation company had planned. If things had gone the way SCO wanted, it would be facing IBM to see how much money it would get for IBM using Unix code in Linux. Instead of that fantasy coming true, SCO will be trying to hang on to what's left of its assets from Novell.

Darl McBride is a silly, greedy, amoral man, well acquainted with lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. Someone from A Large Company Who Would Benefit From Linux FUD (ALCWWBFLFUD) whispered in his ear that there were millions just ripe for the picking.

Despite evidence that his case was shaky to say the least, Darl pressed on in the belief that folks would just pay him to go away and that IBM would too. ALCWWBFLFUD knew that in the end he hadn't a prayer but that wasn't the point, the whole brouhaha made a (disappointingly small) number of people hesitate before dumping MS. More importantly these shenanigans motivated GPL3 which split the codebase and polarised the FOSS camp - a perhaps unforeseen but welcome side effect.

ALCWWBFLFUD told RBC and BayStar that they reckoned SCO was a good place to put money and greed did the rest. A number of folks burned their fingers but that was of no concern to ALCWWBFLFUD.

Now SCO is going down the toilet and Darl and others face some serious charges but ALCWWBFLFUD doesn't care. For the expenditure of a few million they've caused serious aggravation to their main rival and have plausible deniability.